After the Accident, I Relearned My Own Handwriting
My right hand forgot everything; the alphabet and I started over.
Eleven weeks after a delivery van turned my bicycle into modern art, an occupational therapist slid a child's alphabet workbook across the table and asked me to write the letter a.
I laughed. Then I tried... and I stopped laughing.
The line my hand produced looked like a lie detector test. It wandered off the dotted guide, thought about becoming a c, gave up halfway, and died somewhere near the cartoon pencil in the margin, a smiling character the workbook insisted was named Mr. Scribbles. I was thirty one years old, I wrote for a living, and Mr. Scribbles was now my colleague.
The accident itself I mostly know from other people's sentences. A June morning, a left turn the van driver swears he signaled... and then a gap in the tape. I woke up in a ward that smelled of iodine and stewed tea, with a right arm wrapped like a gift nobody wanted, and a doctor explaining, slowly, that the nerves that ran my hand had been crushed at the elbow. Median nerve. He kept saying it gently, median nerve, the way you might say the name of a difficult relative.
Nerves regrow, when they regrow at all... at about a millimeter a day. A millimeter a day from my elbow to my fingertips. I did that math in the hospital bed, badly and repeatedly, and every version of the answer was: most of a year, if I was lucky.
Here is what nobody tells you about losing your writing hand. The hand is the least of it.
What you actually lose is the private, unphotographed self that lived in the writing. My grocery lists, my margin notes, my signature with its overconfident swoop on the initial. All of it, gone overnight, like a language whose last speaker had died.
The signature was the worst. In September, my bank declined to accept the shaky mark I produced, because it did not match their records. A polite woman compared two pieces of paper and told me, in effect, that I was no longer verifiably myself. I went out to the car park and sat on a bollard for a long time. There are cleaner ways to describe that feeling, but the truest one is this...
My own name stopped recognizing me.
So, the workbook. My therapist, Priti, a woman with the patience of geology, ran me through it three sessions a week. Squeeze the orange putty. Pinch the clothes pegs. And then, at the end, ten minutes of letters, dotted lines, arrows showing which direction a stroke should go, as if directions to a b were not something I had known since before I knew my address.
Some letters came back like old friends. The letter l is generous; it is basically a line with self esteem. The letter o took a fortnight. The letter g was a personal enemy for two entire months, with its loop below the line demanding a rotation my fingers could not find. I have a page somewhere of forty seven failed g's, and it looks like a field of dropped keys.
Progress was real, but it was potato-clock slow, and there were weeks it went backwards. In November I threw Mr. Scribbles across the kitchen. In December I picked him up again, because the alternative was dictating my life into a phone forever, and some things, I had learned, refuse to pass through a keyboard. You cannot type a condolence card. I had tried. It came out embalmed.
The turn, when it came, was not the one I was waiting for.
It happened in February, on an ordinary Tuesday, during the ten dotted minutes. I had graduated to full words by then, wobbly but legible, and Priti asked me to write my own name, then whatever sentence came to mind. I wrote: the kettle is broken again.
Then I looked down at the page... and the hair went up on my arms.
It was not my handwriting.
It was my grandfather's.
The slant was his, leaning left against the grain of the world like a man walking into wind. The capital T with its little flag. The k with a loop he always made and I never had. My old handwriting, the fast, entitled scrawl of a person whose hands had never failed, was nowhere on the page. What had come back through the rebuilt wiring was older than my habits, and I knew exactly where it came from.
I was five when he taught me my letters, at a kitchen table with an oilcloth cover, my small hand riding on top of his enormous one while he drew each stroke and named it. He called the alphabet the tool kit. He said it the way other men said the names of engines. He died when I was nineteen, and I had not consciously thought about those kitchen table afternoons in years.
But my hand had thought about them. When everything recent was crushed at the elbow, my body went looking for the deepest copy of writing it had, and the deepest copy was his.
Relearning did not restore me. It restored him.
Handwriting, it turns out, is not stored in the hand. It is stored in whoever loved you enough to sit beside you and teach you your letters.
That night I went to my mother's house and asked for the biscuit tin where she keeps his letters, the ones he sent her from his merchant navy years. We spread them on her table next to my therapy pages, and she went quiet... and then she laughed in the way people laugh when the alternative is crying. Stroke for stroke, flag for flag, loop for loop. Fifty year old ink and eight month old pencil, in the same hand.
"You write like him now," she said. "You used to write like a doctor in a hurry."
I have kept the slant. Priti says that with another year of therapy I could probably iron it out and reconstruct my old scrawl, and I have declined, formally, the way you decline surgery you do not need. The new writing is slower, and the slowness turned out to be a door. Writing at his speed, I noticed I was choosing words differently, more carefully, the way he did. By spring I was filling pages that kept sliding toward memory: the oilcloth, the tool kit, the smell of his tobacco tin. Some of those pages had line breaks. I let them.
I even went back to school about it, in a small way. A friend pointed me to an online academy for writers, and I signed up with the logic that a man relearning his letters may as well relearn everything stacked on top of them. My first assignment came back with a note from the tutor: strong voice, feels inherited. I printed that out. Some jokes the universe writes for you.
The bank has my new signature on file now. It has a flag on the capital and it leans into the wind, and the polite woman compared her two pieces of paper and stamped something, and just like that I was verifiably myself again, except that the self had a grandfather in it.
Last week I reached the final page of the alphabet workbook, the one where Mr. Scribbles congratulates you with confetti. I wrote the alphabet out clean, a to z, every g rotating like a well oiled hinge. Then, below it, where the workbook asks the child to sign their name, I wrote his.
It felt like returning a tool kit.
Then I signed mine, right beside it, in the same hand.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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